Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)

by Frederick Palmer

This was cheerful news for our Army command. It was an augury confirming all our information in the latter days of October. The rapid advance of the other Allied armies to the west was having a pronounced effect. Indeed, during the second stage of the Meuse-Argonne battle, powerful as the German resistance had been, it was not that of full divisions, as a rule, but of elements of divisions hurried into line, their officers sometimes uncertain of the identity of units on their flanks, as they strove to obey orders to hold at any cost. An army, in its many units, is like a series of steel links. For over four years the German army had presented a front possessed of the alternate mobility of a chain and the rigidity of a steel wall. So rapidly was German morale now deteriorating that it looked as if the chain, worn by attrition, might snap in a confusion of scattering links.

America's part in this juncture was that of a two-edged sword. One edge was preparing to strike with all our military force against the German front. It is needless to repeat how influential is psychologic suggestion on a soldier's mood. Our soldiers were forbidden to speak of peace; all thought of peace being as resolutely suppressed in the military mind as apprehension of defeat, when the German offensives in the spring had seemed to be threatening Paris. The average soldier, being a human being, and particularly the veteran who had survived many battles, if he thought the end were near, did not want to be the "last man killed in the war." The more he had endured, the more he wanted to live. So we must leave peace to the peace-makers. The war-makers must keep at war. The harder we fought in the days to come, the better we served the purpose of President Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief.

The other edge of our sword was his Fourteen Points. The German soldier now knew that he could never undertake another offensive. Henceforth his back was against the wall. A soldier who submitted to the will of his superiors in full faith in their promises of victory, a soldier who fought peculiarly for victory on enemy soil, found his great organization, which he had been told was unconquerable, breaking, and himself yielding in disheartening retreat the ground that his sacrifice had won. He may have thought that he had fought in his country's defense by invading France; now he knew that defense had become a matter of the defense of his own soil. Would he fight to the last ditch? Would he resist on the Meuse as the British had at Ypres, and the French at Verdun, and the South at Appomattox? The question was for him, the soldier, to answer. It always is, in every war. Leadership and staff work can effect nothing, unless the soldiers are for battle. The aim of all the propaganda on both sides was to promote the fighting spirit of the masses at home and at the front.

Germany still had millions of armed men, a great staff organization, and immense numbers of guns and quantities of ammunition. The organic disintegration was due to the mood of the Kaiser's atoms, his men. Strike a spark in them, flaming into desperate common defense as a people—and the German army might show as a whole something of the resistance to the death of individual units in the Meuse-Argonne. It was all very well to talk of a swift movement to Berlin; but the Allied armies were themselves becoming exhausted. They were running short of fresh divisions; they were hampered for lack of transport and horses. An army advances slowly against rearguard action alone. Between Berlin and the Allied soldiers, who knew the meaning of interlocking fire from machine-guns manned by small groups of men, were Luxemburg, the walls of the Moselle and the Rhine valleys, and all the stretch of country beyond the Rhine, which meant long lines of railroad communication, many bridges to be built, and an infinite amount of labor. If a million German veterans decided that it was better to die than to yield, though we should go to Berlin, we should have much fighting on the way, increasing the ghastly cost in lives and treasure which was swamping the world in blood and debts. A common view of German character during the war had held that once the Germans knew they were losing, their resistance would collapse; that they would fight well only when the odds were in their favor. This hardly accorded with their record under Frederick the Great. I think that with them, as with all peoples and all soldiers, much depended upon whether or not some event or train of events should have again aroused their passion. They lacked food; but a people in siege desperation will go hungry for a long time.

It was a solace to the German soldier's mind, a tribute to his courage, for him to think that if America had not come into the war he would have won it from the other Allies. He had finished Russia and Rumania; he had France and Britain trembling, when a fresh and gigantic antagonist appeared against him. His retreats had begun just as American troops were making their force felt on the battle line. Despite censorship of the press, belittling our effort, despite the espionage of officers over their men, word traveled fast from German soldier to soldier. By talks with others who had fought, if not by actual contact, every German soldier knew with what freshness and initiative the Americans fought. If we had been slow in preparing, once our enormous preparations came to a head in the immense numbers we were now throwing into battle, the effect was all the more impressive upon the German soldier, and through him upon the German people.

This same America, which was now attacking with such increasing power, had made through its President the peace offer of the Fourteen Points, which had followed his speeches and notes during our neutrality, all to the same effect: that America—then considered weak and unmilitary—was not fighting in a war of conquest. The Fourteen Points guaranteed Germany from the dismemberment and subjection which the military caste had said would be her fate if she ever yielded to the Allies. After he awakened to his leaders' failure to give him victory, the Fourteen Points and associated propaganda were infiltrating into the German soldier's mind as effectively as German infantry infiltrated down a ravine or through a patch of woods. One hand of America driving a bayonet into his face, the other was offering him self-preservation in the rear. Why fight to the last ditch when such terms were offered? Three out of four German soldiers were accepting them in the sense that they were no longer fighting to the death in machine-gun nests. The war was over; they wanted to go home.

It was these two influences in the latter part of October and early November which were weakening the enemy's spirit on our front. Our conviction that this time we would break through waxed stronger every day. Our men thought of the enemy as groggy; another smashing blow would topple him. We, too, wanted to go home; we wanted an end of the horror and the hardship, as the days grew colder and the ground a moister bed. One supreme effort, and the orgy might be finished. The second stage of the battle had already passed, in our thoughts. We were entering a new stage, which should free us from the grim routine of siege. Something of the fervor of our preparations for the first stage, tempered and strengthened by the experience gained in the second, was in our preparation for the third.

Originally Marshal Foch had set the attack for October 28th; but postponement to November 1st was found to be better suited for his plans. This gave us time to take Aincreville and Brieulles, to bring up still more material, and further improve our arrangements. This time we were to have enough guns. More divisional artillery had come from the French foundries to the training camps, whence the waiting gunners brought them to the front. We had an increase of Army and Corps artillery, while Admiral Plunkett's bluejackets, with their long-range naval pieces which they wanted to take up as close to the enemy as if they were machine-guns, were cheering to the eye. Yet altogether we were to have only one hundred guns of American make in the battle; all the rest were of French make. Our columns of ammunition trucks, increased by the recent arrival of large numbers from home, seemed endless. Great piles of shells were rising beside the roads. The artillery of the 90th Division alone was to fire over 68,000 rounds in twenty-four hours on November 1st. All the artillery of divisions in reserve and in rest were brought up to the line. Artillerymen could endure longer service than the infantry. Those off duty might steal some sleep under shell-fire. This time we were to make a shield of shells, and a bridge of shells, too, for our troops. Despite our deep concentrations and the quantity of supplies moving, there was none of the confusion of the early days of the battle. Our staff heads had learned in a fierce school to control traffic. The machine was running comparatively smoothly—no military machine can ever run exactly so except in inspired accounts—equal to the extra and foreseen demand upon it. Our officers in the different headquarters were making their tables of barrages and the dispositions for attack with the routine confidence of clerks balancing a ledger. We were no longer new to war.

The plan for November 1st was only carrying out the final stage of the first plan which our ambition had dared: a sweep over the last of the crests of the whale-back, and down the irregular descents toward the westward course of the Meuse and the Lille-Metz railway. On the left, the French Fourth Army was pressing against the western edge of the Bourgogne forest. Our left flank and their right flank were to "scallop" the forest, while it was filled with gas, instead of accompanying the flanking movement by a frontal drive, as we did in the Argonne.

Our National Army divisions had come into their own, the National Guard divisions, which in the first and second stages had helped to pave the way for a glorious day, being in reserve, or "resting" in that muddy Saint-Mihiel sector. In Dickman's First Corps, at the left, were the 78th Division, still in line after the taking of the citadel and its ordeal in the Loges Wood; the 77th, come into line for a second time, after it had been in camp in its own Argonne Forest; and the peripatetic 80th, which had swung round from the Third Corps, come into line for the third time. Two divisions formed Summerall's Fifth Corps in the center: the veteran 2nd, which, after its service in helping to disengage Rheims, was back "home" in our army; and the 89th, which had made Bantheville Wood secure as its "jumping-off" place. In Hines' Third Corps on the right were the 90th Division, which had taken Bantheville, and the 5th, now masters of Brieulles of evil repute and of Aincreville. Across the river with the French Second Colonial Corps, as an influential and thoroughly inclusive part of the whole movement, the 79th was preparing to start from Molleville farm to storm the Borne de Cornouiller, and the 26th, the only National Guard division in the front line, clinging to Belleu Wood and the edge of Ormont Wood, preparatory to rushing the eastern rim of the bowl.